I was still getting the last letter or so sticking out, but what I perceived as the bigger problem (pretty much the whole thing jumping out of the background area) seemed to be resolved ... although on checking further it wasn't -- it just needed to be zoomed much higher before this occurred.

I think we should use this as an opportunity to send a very clear signal to the IE7 team:

We aren't going to fix your mistakes for you this time.

The zooming feature in IE7 has been known to contain faults for months. And been widely criticised in web development blogs because of this. If they've chosen to ship it in a faulty state, it's their fault. Half-implementing a feature which ends up working worse than the feature it effectively replaces is a very daft decision for them to make, imho.

I guess the one potential upside of this particular bug is that those most likely to notice are those users who require the zoom feature to make small text accessible.
Whilst this may make things that bit harder for them in the short term, the accessibility lobby has political backing which the hoards of disgruntled web developers never has had. This could mean a more powerful lobby gunning for MSIE, forcing them to take notice and improve the quality of their software.

If I were taken to flights of fancy, I might allow myself to think that bugs such as these could be the catalyst for legislative enforcement of the UAAG (via DDA, etc…), legally obliging browser developers to adhere to the same acknowledgement and use of standards which site authors are now subject to c/o the WCAG (via DDA, etc…).
(Clearly IE/Win's failure to facilitate the resizing of px fonts, despite the UAAG specifying as such, failed to catch any accessibility lobbyist's interest.)

You can set IE to ignore the font sizes specified in web pages, effectively allowing it to resize text sized in px and other absolute units. That isn't the default setting and it is not straightforward to find it, but it does exist.

Interesting point that user agents might gain greater focus from institutes, charities and suchlike concerned with accessibility and that the vendors will pay more attention to them now. Windows generally seems to be quite aware of accessibility, and has various systems and features to try to aid that, but yeah, there is more they could do.